The EdTech Bach

• 17.36 – Added a YackPack to my PBwiki sidebar a while back, but doesn’t seem to be working as it should. Any suggestions, fellow work group members?
• 17.38 – Oh wait, just saw that I can click to talk, but can also click to go to a YackPack WalkieTalkie web channel page that was ‘automagically’ created.
• 17.39 – Wonder who’s online to trial this. Ah, J. in Canada is on Skype…
• 17.44 – J. and I yacking away on the Walkie Talkie page. Bit of an echo on her side, she says my sound is clear. Little number in right bottom corner let’s you know how many people are viewing the YackPack button and could be potential yackers. Works like a WalkieTalkie which I used to love as a kid.
• 17.46 – J. and I now also yacking away on my PBWiki Sidebar. This stuff is too easy!!!

PBwiki offers YackPack as free plug-in, no messing around with code, just click the Insert Plugin button when you Edit page. Great for working together on a wiki. You can see when your collaborators are online and yack with them. I have added a Recent visitors plug-in as well, so I can see not only how many but who’s online.

Twitter entered my online life in Nov 2007 as part of a course in emerging learning environments. My workgroup wanted to pick a ‘really out there social networking tool that you would not think of using in education’ and take it for a spin. And we chose Twitter because how educational can answering the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters really be?

Well it turns out that not only is it educational, it is addictive. How? In a variety of ways. For instance by helping me find neat tools as today I discovered 3 new tools and Adobe AIR in the space of an hour.

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Working both in WebCT and Moodle this semester, I’m discovering quite how different these environments are. More about that later. In the meantime, 2 features present in WebCT that I would like to see in Moodle.

• Group tool, where students can self-select into groups with a maximum number of slots and based on this grouping, are enrolled in the appropriate forums/chats etc.

• Replies to My Posts – in forum-based courses you are unlikely to read everything. But there are certain things you always want to read, the replies to your own posts. Having these grouped as you log in to the course is very handy. Perhaps this could sit in the My Posts tab?

I want course version control, just like you get in wikis. This would be useful when developing a site with a team, particularly when some team members are new to online learning developments. The history can show you what other team members have been working on and you could roll back in case of mishaps (”I went to move something and accidentally deleted all the files, I don’t know how it happened”).

It may give new online teachers confidence to try new things, if they knew that the previous version is always there to fall back on.

As a Moodle administrator, am quite enjoying the experience of being a Moodle student. And am finding some things I would like…

1. Intuitive forum handling. My fellow students struggle with the e-mail copies and the read/unread messages. The first PD session I did on Moodle had the same results – all my participants bewildered and overwhelmed at the message deluge. And you control that in your profile where the controls have some outlandish names. Read/unread messages is called Forum tracking…

2. Ability to tag a post for future reference, or as “I must come back to this.” The USQ course is very text heavy, with a combination of the wiki, the blogs and the forum posts in Moodle to track. Sometimes I read a post but am not ready to answer yet. Wouldn’t it be good if I could tag it/flag it to return at later stage?

3. Why not a drafts place for your posts, so you can start a message but let it sit in the system until you are ready to post. Most blogs offer this functionality. Does anyone know of an LMS that does? Is there a reason why LMSs wouldn’t?

Have added the del.icio.us widget to this blog. It was as easy as dragging & dropping. In the past I’ve run my own installation of Wordpress and it involved some delicate cutting & pasting in the theme .php files to add things like this in the sidebar. So am loving edublogs already!

Have decided to name my del.icio.us widget Flotsam. Not in the sense of junk, rather “fragments of many things.”